Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.
When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.
They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.
In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.
The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.
We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.
This is where we are right now. And i’m not gonna lie it feels pretty magical 🧚♀️
Qwen3.6 27B running inside of Pi coding agent via Llama.cpp on the MacBook Pro
For non-trivial tasks on the @huggingface codebases, this feels very, very close to hitting the latest Opus in Claude Code, or whatever shiny monopolistic closed source API of the day is.
In full airplane mode.
Most people haven’t realized this yet.
If you have, it means you have a huge headstart to what I call the second revolution of AI.
Powerful local models for efficiency, security, privacy, sovereignty 🔥
Only one chance in this lifetime…
Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.
I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
So while the Knesset passes a Palestinian death penalty bill, another Knesset bill – one that the UK has much more directly enabled, and which will lead to many, many death penalties being handed out – is about to get its second reading.
Let me tell you about it 🧵
Meet Enas Al-Ghoul, a Palestinian agricultural engineer turning crisis into innovation:
Her simple yet brilliant solar still purifies salty seawater for daily use, while the captured heat lets her prepare meals right on the setup.
Absolute respect for this kind of survival creativity.🇵🇸
@YasirQadhi Asalaamoalaikum. My sister is working on her dissertation on Ghazali's occasionalism and would like to use your MM article on atomism. Is there an academic reference for the paper as MM is not ideal?